Article discreditng the thesis that Mao "killed millions of people" in The Great Leap
#5
(12-19-2016, 06:12 AM)Jester Wrote: It turns out, if you ignore everything on the basis that it disagrees with you because it's "bourgeois," then everything that remains does indeed reinforce your warped view.

Great way of turning things around, but yea, bullshit. I have nothing to gain here, I am interested in facts, not ideology. I've made it quite clear by now that I have many ideological disagreements with Maoism and I'm not a MLM.

But Western sources are ideologically driven because they must be anti-communist, lest they become discredited in the eyes of their peers. Some of them were even paid off by institutions like the CIA. Their agenda is to justify capitalism's legitmacy while demonizing and slandering socialism, not actual facts or a meaningful historical analysis which are of little interest to them. It is you here who has the ideological ulterior motive, not I.


Quote:Or you could actually read some of the scholarly literature, rather than just parroting ideologically flattering essays. None of your questions have particularly difficult answers.

I will, and I will investigate the credibility of their sources deeply. Every little nook and cranny.

Quote:The birth rate dropped by nearly *half*. What's the alternative hypothesis, that babies became extremely unfashionable for a couple years?

Your number is a bit inflated (I wouldn't expect anything less from a capitalist apologist), it was more like 25-30% if we are talking from 1959-61, the so-called 3 year period. But moreover, this makes it out like I hold the position that there were no hard times and difficulties with the GLF, which is untrue. No one is debating this. In fact, I am still very skeptical of the GLF in general since trying to build socialism out of a primarily agrarian economy is very difficult at best, impossible at worst. I would probably say overall that only Fidel Castro was able to pull this off on a relatively successful level but the material conditions in 1959 Cuba were still quite different from 1959 China. But I am also skeptical of western bourgeois sources that have a painfully obvious agenda, who will do and say absolutely anything to protect and uphold said agenda. If you cannot understand that, then there is no reaching you.

In difficult times, yes, birth rates decrease because people do not want or cannot have an extra mouth to feed. No one said otherwise.

However, this is still a stretch at best to make a case for wide spread famine, and entirely insufficent for making the claim as the biggest famine in history. Nor does it tell us anything if all of this can be attributed solely to Mao's policies. Mao himself admitted he made numerous errors, but this doesn't give capitalists ammunition to consider his movement a conquest for blood and population control rather than an attempt to industrialize and build socialism. It also doesn't take into account the droughts, piss poor weather, and the fact that it was actually capitalists and reformists, who of course opposed the revolution, that had control of the Chinese goverment - the bourgeois once again doing their best to sabatoge the revolution per usual. But of course, you never hear about that in western sources. Gee, I fucking wonder why.

Quote:Estimates vary because China is enormous, population data is poor, and counting excess mortality is always tricky business. If you employ conservative methods, you find "only" 15 million or so excess deaths. If you try to estimate the true number, you end up with higher figures, but are forced to rely on less conservative assumptions.

Translation: the data is unreliable and wildly inconsistent. Glad we can agree on that.

Quote:In 1960, the peak of the famine, the population of China does indeed shrink. In an ordinary, non-famine year, there would be rapid population growth. Shrinking population is indicative of a *severe* famine. Look at any population graph of China; the "hole" caused by the famine is obvious.


Comrade, you are absolutely wrong here. The Chinese population went up, not down, in 1960 from the prior year. The birth rate went down and the death rate went up, and China's population in 1960 was STILL higher than the prior year, even if only by a small amount. 1960 did have the smallest annual population increase in Chinese history, but that is a very different thing from the population actually falling. And in fact, it went up every year between 1949-2004. You want population graphs? Here you go:

http://www.chinatoday.com/data/china.population.htm

That was actually a chart not a graph, but the larger point remains. You were saying what now, about a severe famine?

Quote:I've long since lost any interest in hearing your views on most anything

Woe is me, my views are shunned by a capitalist loving, imperialist supporting liberal. I don't think I can bear the thought Rolleyes
https://www.youtube.com/user/FireIceTalon


"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
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RE: Article discreditng the thesis that Mao "killed millions of people" in T... - by FireIceTalon - 12-19-2016, 07:29 AM

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